Why Machine Sex? / Violet Blue goes deep undercover to find out why women like to have sex with machines, and why people pay good money to watch

Violet Blue, special to SF Gate

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, October 2, 2008

As this year's international sex and technology conference Arse Elektronika 2008 hit its stride last Saturday -- that's Folsom Street Fair eve here in San Francisco  I found myself on a panel discussing "The Erotic of the Machine" (listen to the MP3 here) with six men and a sizable audience. The men were an assembly of artists from the Bay Area and Seattle to Austria and France, along with a sex machine maker, a sex machine pornographer and a spokesperson from San Francisco's Kink.com, where the most famous sex machine site hails from. (That's F-ing Machines.com, also here in San Francisco.)

They went off on an existential tangent as we discussed sex with machines, ideas for "softer" interfaces, theories about the industrial revolution, gender and sexuality. I sat on my hands with a burning query until I couldn't stand it anymore. Finally, I grabbed the microphone and asked Monochrom'sJohannes Grenzfurthner if I could ask Kink.com's Thomas Roche what I thought was the million-dollar question. And for Kink that million dollars is probably literal. I said, "Thomas. You work at Kink. The F-ing Machines site is insanely popular. Why!? Why do people want to watch women have sex with machines, and pay good money to do it? What's the appeal?"

Thomas is of course used to this type of outburst from me onstage. His response was fantastic, including conjecture about the viewers projecting themselves into the scene, but he centered on the basic fact that it's a woman alone, pleasuring herself, with no unnecessary window dressing tacked on. It's true that a machine enables huge variations in how one conjures an orgasm, as in speed, stroke, size, vibration, steadiness, how long it all lasts -- things that wouldn't be possible with a human. Thomas told me, "There are many other advantages to sex with a human, and many things you will not get -- yet -- from a machine, like skin touch, smell, eye contact, tenderness, etc. Those things that humans alone can provide (so far) are only part of the sexual experience, but they are so fraught with intensity that they can often dominate the experience. Since women in particular are socialized to not be blatant about physical pleasure, even if they're blatant about sexuality, seeing that kind of physical expression, and focusing on the purely penetrative and rhythmic, is liberating for many, including women and men who like watching women."

So the appeal might just boil down to the basics. No guys, no fake lesbians with big hair and scary fingernails. We discussed the assumption that the viewer is male and homophobic, though a significant number of F-ing Machines viewers are actually female.

Put that in your engine and smoke it. But okay, so it's likely that the appeal goes beyond some people thinking machines are sexy, like, so sexy they just gotta see someone hump one, or do the piston-pummeling themselves. (Interestingly, I don't find sex machines attractive or erotic in the least, not like certain art machines or motorcycles or cars.) Also debunked are the widespread notions about the machine as the male stand-in -- though that's a pervasive fear about men, sex machines and women that I've seen recur starting when I worked at the Dildo Hut. It's one of those sex-myth things, like the "frigid woman" or female "hysteria." In the 7+ years I sold vibrators to customers, it was sadly, regretfully common to be selling some guy his girlfriend's or wife's first vibrator -- and find myself in some form of a scenario where I needed to reassure him that he would not, in fact, be "replaced" by the machine.

Although for some people, that would be an ideal solution -- when this came up, I did recapture the microphone and say that, "A machine will break your arm, but not your heart." Yet the women who have sex with machines aren't worried about a broken arm or avoiding heartbreak  sure, they're doing it for money at Kink.com, but what about the women who have sex with machines for pleasure? I was wondering exactly that when one of my panel-mates, teledildonic roboticist inventor Allen Stein (dnn.thethrillhammer.com), talked about his wealthy female clients who privately purchase his custom machines for high-dollar sales.

This is more than the housewife sitting on the washing machine during "spin" cycle. In Arse Elektronika's just-published anthology from last year's conference "pr0nnovation? Pornography and Technological Innovation," one woman claims that girls having sex with machines is actually feminism in action.

She happens to be the woman who, at Arse Elektronika's 2007 conference, spontaneously volunteered to get naked behind a sheet and have sex with one of Kink's most 1980s-looking sex drones -- think, like, a very public roll in the hay with the not-so-sexy robotic stars of "Short Circuit." This woman, who goes by the name Binx, didn't know the conference promoters, and was not an audience plant. In the book she gives a first-person account of the experience:

"The F-zall made it hard for me to feel anything but Intense Pleasure, oh yes, with capital letters. I had the hands-down best orgasm of my life, both subjectively and objectively. From all reports I squirted [ejaculated] about five feet into the air -- a force I had never come close to achieving." She added, "(...) I have hardly told any of my friends about my tryst with F-zilla."

So why did she do it? Binx tells us the real reason she hooked up with a robot is "Feminism, baby. (...) F-ing machines are the pornographic equivalent of third-wave feminism. It does not show men being violent towards women because it does not include men, only women and their sweet, sweet machines."

Which is all well and good until robots get equal rights. Then Kink is going to have some serious HR issues -- and don't even get me started about how porn objectifies machines.

Blue headlines at conferences ranging from ETech, The Forbes Internet Leadership Conference, LeWeb and SXSW: Interactive, to Google Tech Talks at Google, Inc. Her tech site is Techyum; her audio and e-books are at Digita Publications.

For more information and links to Web sites discussed in Open Source Sex, go to Violet Blue's Web site, tinynibbles.com.